Godzilla is a lizard.
Researchers of trauma hold that the persistent memories of shattering
experiences rest in the reptilian area of our brain. As I watched Godzilla pound his way through Tokyo , I felt I was watching
the towering incarnation of the vaporized host of A-bomb victims take form to
rage against the machine.
50 years ago they made the film, in 1954, and a strange double
vision emerges. “Godzilla” was one of
the first movies to prominently feature science and technology as both the raw
fixtures of life and the lens through which we construct our modern framework
of meaning. Machines abound, as do
scientists to supply our interpretation of the impossible. It is a scientist who heroically gives his life
to kill the creature and safeguard civilization. But on the other side of that coin was the
monster lashing out at it all: at the electrical wires, at the machines, at the
buildings. On the one hand, I felt oddly
comforted by the scenes of technicians activating huge banks of electrical fencing to try to fry the beast,
with their clipboards and rooms full of dials and switches. I wanted to think, “They’ll make it
right.” Then again, the lizard in me
couldn’t help cheering on Godzilla as he made trash out of urban grids of
buildings and pavement. I grasped the
statement made by the film, as Blue Oyster Cult summarized it: “History shows again and again how Nature
points up the folly of man—Godzilla!”). Godzilla is Nature’s revenge, a walking volcano,
a mobile earthquake, a thick-skinned tsunami.
Although the beast was translated into English as “he,” I have heard
that he was in fact originally a "she," which only makes the
identification of her as a force of Mother Nature more exact.
I was struck by the depiction of Tokyo, a city in the early
1950’s, as already being surrounded by high tension wires, already crawling
with cars, already lit up like a mall parking lot at night. This seems bad enough, but now we are 50
years further along that same path. Somewhere
inside the simple reptile within, which only wants to catch its daily quota of
bugs (or giant squid?), must object to all this industrious clutter and the
corresponding loss of pristine habitat.
Perhaps it was my own inner iguana that wondered, just the other day,
how many organisms have to die to make way for one mile of paved road—counting
all the impossibly tiny worlds with their miniscule critters, the number must
reach the billions of billions—how’s that for genocide? But my iguana, speaking in experiential
terms, has never known any better. It
has never roamed free in the Galapagos Islands ,
only thumped around in a cage….Perhaps that is part of the purpose of art, to give
form to unwitnessed, unlived realities, that are nevertheless real, and urgent.
We may sense them only dimly, via some as yet unextinguished memory of Eden , until they stomp
across the screen of one’s imagination, breathing radioactive fire, making the
reckless pay.
The hero of “Godzilla” sacrifices his life in order to ensure that the powerful do not get hold of his “oxygen destroyer” and use it for
military-political ends. He feared that
reckless governments would end up turning Earth into a graveyard. I wonder why.
Speaking of oxygen, my thoughts are these: Post-industrial civilization replaces more
and more green plants with buildings, highways, parking lots. Even farms lower oxygen production by
planting fewer plants per square inch, and plowing them under in the fall. We convert to CO2 the coal and oil
born of forests that in their day produced oxygen enough to respirate the herds
of impossibly huge dinosaurs. We kill
off, even make extinct, the plants’ symbiotic partners, the animals. One has to wonder if the creators of
“Godzilla” knew enough science to see all this coming, or if their talent was
more intuitive-artistic. We’re talking
oxygen here—try going without it for 60 seconds—and yet without much effort I
am able to name several clear and present threats to the supply. No wonder the filmmakers in question felt
they had to make such a strong statement; they wanted us to feel Godzilla’s
gigantic foot hovering over our living rooms, to hear his savage foghorn cry,
and tremble.
I could go on indefinitely about ecological holocaust, but
what I am really wondering is: 50 years
after Godzilla roared her warning, what am I to sacrifice?
How does tiny me help turn the massive corpse of Godzilla into a
mountain of compost from which new life may spring?...Tough, given that,
despite the monster's de-fleshing at movie’s end, I don’t believe she’s even
dead yet (because the problem that spawned her isn't; and because they made 25
more movies). But all the same, one
feels that, due to the gravity of our situation (we’re talking oxygen), to give one’s life (or lifestyle)
in some heroic way is the least I could do.
copyright 2004 by James F. Kotowski
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